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Starting with v0.75.0, a massive realignment of colonial GDP will be taking place, and some of you with massive GDP figures numbering in the quadrillions or more may not like it (or may not care), but on the whole, it will be a lot better.

Before v0.75.0, GDP has been just a lazy calculation, adding up the market value of all resources in a colony, along with all of the money that colonists had in their wallets. This was an easy way to set it up at the beginning, and it sort of worked, and not too many people cares, so I left it as is.

The problem, is that anybody who knows about economics will know that this calculation has nothing to do with GDP, making the number totally meaningless as a measure of economic output. The result was that a colony could have a massive GDP just by getting gifts, making an epic trade, or simply existing for a long time and building up massive resource stockpiles. Again, all of this is fine, but it really gives no valuable information about the health of your colony's economy.

With this update, I decided to just totally scrap the old GDP figures, and implement a real GDP calculation, in the economic sense. Going forward, GDP is now a rolling calculation of the gross industrial output of your colony over the span of one "year." This makes it a far more accurate and meaningful measure of the industrial strength of your colony.

So, in order to be able to make the calculation, I first had to definitively determine what one "year" is in My Colony. After reviewing some of the existing game mechanics, I came out with one year being 120,000 "tick" cycles in the game, or roughly one hour of play time. So going forward, the GDP of your colony will be the sum of all industrial output over the last hour of play time.

The part that will sting at first, is that since it is a rolling calculation, that means the GDP figure will be incomplete in your colony until you have played for an hour. I could probably just check the current output and extrapolate it out to fill in the gaps, and I might at some point, but since the issue is irrelevant after an hour of play, I haven't bothered to do it yet.

Now the other part that might sting, it that this represent a complete and total realignment of the various GDP's across the galaxy, especially among older more established colonies that are hoarding epic amounts of resources. Just now that the intention is not to punish those colonies in any way, but to create a more accurate measure of the industrial output of the colony. And really the fact that you just have millions and millions of resources stockpiled, doesn't really say much about the health of your colony's economy.

Because of the change, most people (probably everyone) will be seeing a massive reduction in their GDP. I mean massive. On the flip side, it is happening to everybody across the board, and you will now now for sure what the economic strength is of your colony.

Honestly, the old way of computing it was dumb. A brand new colony with 2 people could get an epic gift from their commonwealth and suddenly have a GDP rivaling colonies that have build up millions of population over the years.

And speaking of gifts, they are not computed in the new GDP calculation. It is solely based on the industrial output of the colony. Although taxes you collect from your charter colonies DO factor in.

Anyway, this actually gives way to new game mechanics that will be able to take advantage of a new GDP calculation. The GDP now gives you a real measure of the strength of your economy, and you will be able to monitor and respond to the boom/bust cycles of the colony. It's not in there as of this writing, but I will be soon adding the GDP Growth % statistic so you can monitor if your colony is growing or in a recession. A growing economy will boost your approval, while a recession will harm it. If your colony enters a great depression, you will get protesting.

Finally the GDP growth rate stat will also be added to the online database, so there will be a ranking coming soon of which economies are growing the fastest. Sort of like in real life!

Anyway, that is the change that is coming. I hope not too many people are upset about their massive GDP numbers being cut down to size, but I think in order to move things forward, it had to happen eventually.

Just a bit more info on the new GDP changes.

The game behind the scenes now calculates your quarterly GDP growth, and your "colonial news agency" reports this data to you if you have the GBT price news ticker enabled in-game.

As you can see, your colony now has some economic "analysts" that try to predict what the next quarter GDP print will come in at, based on the trends of the last few quarters.

The game stats (both in-game and the website) will show your current quarterly GDP print, as well as the total annual GDP for the most recent full in-game year.

Something I am about to implement, which I have not finished yet, is inflation adjustments. When working on GDP, I started noticing that the rates fluctuate pretty wildly, since they are based on market prices from the galactic board of trade. To smooth this out a bit, the game is going to start recording a rolling history of the average GBT price for a range of resources, and using the price difference to smooth out the GDP growth stats. This is sort of like they do in real life, when they adjust GDP numbers for inflation.

So for example, if your GDP rose by 10% in the quarter, but the GBT prices its based on rose by 12%, then in reality your GDP actually shrunk by 2%. Opposite is true if GBT prices are falling. Anyway, it's not 100% perfect, but real life GDP calculations aren't either. But I think factoring out the price inflation factor will give the best and most useful number possible, and also prevent people from trying to somehow goose up their growth rates by posting a bunch of GBT trades. Although considering everybody's GDP is based on the same prices, that wouldn't help them much relative to other colonies anyway.

Let me first start off by saying that I know bast is focused on finishing antiquitas and he probably will not consider another race until he has time to focus solely on my colony.

So here are my ideas for races that could be put in the game. I can only include six because the poll only allows for six possible answers.

1. Automations:
Description: A Utopian sentient robot society whose sole purpose is to terraform worlds into beautiful paradises. They need less care than organic colonists, they have no need for a government since greed, deceit, and violence are not a part of their nature, and they only produce what they need to terraform the planet and survive as they give the rest back to their planet. They prefer to be an isolated society but warmly welcome and care for newcomers from other races.

Difficulty: Very Easy-easy
Production potential: the least out of all races
Main building resource: ore
Terraforming Potential: the most efficient out of all races
Economic potential: very low
Governmental potential: the least out of all races
research potential: average
growth rate: very high
Tourist potential: very high
Food and water production: the most efficient out of all races
Micromanagement needs at beginning of game: very little.
Colonist eats: power and small amounts of oil, new colonists are built from ore.
Colonist entertained by: Work, walking around when planet is between 5-15 mil atmosphere, research.
Building method: buildings are built by vehicles, same as humans and insectoids.
optimum atmosphere range: 5-15 mil
Colonizable atmosphere range: 0-100

2.) Reptilians
Description: A society built on honor for one's neighbor and zealous loyalty to the theocracy. These people are known for their vast uses of crystalline since a viable source of regolith, ore, and gold couldn't be found on their home planet. They synthesize the purest crystalline out of all races. The reptilians need less governing, but they can still build a very strong government unlike the automations. A more advanced race than humans, the reptilians build structures that are more autonomous and require less workers. Their honorbound and zealous disposition often prevents them from asking important questions though, which limits the amount of research they produce, and their technology and society allow them to function very well in all environments, which hinders their motivation to terraform even though they would still prefer to live in a hospitable environment. Because of the reptilians tendency to colonize planets with hostile environments, not many people want to move to reptilian worlds. The reptilians are not know for their capacity for trading and economics as they serve a theocracy, but they do need money to survive and trading is a means to an end for them.


Difficulty: medium-hard
Production potential: very high
Main building resource: crystalline
Terraforming Potential: the least efficient out of all races
Economic potential: average
Governmental potential: the best out of all races
research potential: low
Growth rate: low
Tourist potential: low
Food and water production: average
Micromanagement needs at beginning of game: low to moderate.
Colonist eats: food and water
Colonist entertained by: religion, fighting arenas, human-like entertainment
building method: buildings warps are started and left alone to build themselves as the vehicle does other tasks. This slows down build speed though.
optimum atmosphere range: 2.5-30mil
Colonizable atmosphere range: 0-100

3.) Jellyfish
Description: The Jellyfish thrive in high atmospheric conditions as they do not live on the ground but build their cities in the sky out of floating structures. The jellyfish survive solely on atmosphere instead of food and water. The jellies pride themselves in their various uses of atmosphere, but this drains the planet of all atmosphere eventually, so it's a race against time to develop the technologies and resources for adding atmosphere back to the planet. On their homeworld, a gas giant, native plants and animals balance the ecosystem by producing atmosphere, but even that isn't enough to support a fast growing civilization. The jellies are creatures of curiosity, which fuels their motivation for research, and their society promotes a balanced governmental authority. They tend to be avid traders and economists and are very welcoming, but their high atmospheric environment is inhospitable to most races, hindering tourism and immigration. Their terraforming methods are very effective, but their needs for atmosphere always put a damper on any terraforming effects. When colonizing a low atmospheric planet, they build bubble-like structures on the ground that rise into the sky as the planet's atmosphere increases. These bubbles need to be attached to one another so that jellies can travel inside of them, because they lack the technology to develop environmental suits to walk outside on those planets. The jellies also use different animals from their homeworld to collect resources and morph into structures.

Difficulty: medium
Production potential: average
Main building resource: atmosphere
Terraforming Potential: high
Economic potential: the best out of all races
Governmental potential: average
research potential: very high
growth rate: very high
Tourist potential: very low
Food and water production: the least efficient out of all races
Micromanagement needs at beginning of game: depends on the planet.
Colonist eats: atmosphere
Colonist entertained by: regular entertainment
building method: worker animals are morphed into structures and cannot be helped by other workers, this causes a slower build speed.
optimum atmosphere range: 10-100 mil
Colonizable atmosphere range: 0-100

4.) Snowmen
Description: A younger race, the snowmen live in smaller tribes and work together to expand their reach. They look like yeti with thick white fur, but don't let them fool you, they are crafty. They thrive in taiga environments where wood and snow abound, but they have difficulty working and moving in warmer environments. They were uplifted and given space travel technology by this LIS, but they were never given the technology to colonize planets that aren't within the 1 mil to 15 mil range. Their tribal form of government makes it hard for them to form a strong government and they aren't recognized as advanced enough to be taken seriously by most space-faring races. Some people even keep them as slaves to do their work. As a result, the snowmen are cynical and inhospitable toward outsiders and have trouble accepting anyone of another race into their society. They devote all of their time to gathering resources and materials for building up the colony because they long to be recognized as an official space-faring race. Their mass production plans require many many jobs though due to their primitive machines and buildings, and this race has average growth, so progress through the game will be slower.

Difficulty: hard-brutal
Production potential: high
Main building resource: wood
Terraforming Potential: average
Economic potential: the least of all the races
Governmental potential: low
research potential: the best out of all races
growth rate: average
Tourist potential: the least out of all races
Food and water production: average
Micromanagement needs at beginning of game: high
Colonist eats: food, water
Colonist entertained by: primitive and human-like entertainment
building method: built by workers/vehicles like xolarg and humans build.
optimum atmosphere range: 1-10 mil
Colonizable atmosphere range: 1-10 mil

4.) Ancients
Description: Those purple buildings that you see in every advanced colony; yeah, they came from these guys. The most advanced race in the game, most ancients see all other races as inferior to them and usually won't trade with other races unless they have to. This god complex makes them too arrogant to see their mistakes or to try to improve their technology and they are more than willing to invite outsiders from primitive races to bask in the glory of their technology. As the most advanced race, they are inherently the best at resource production. Their buildings are more autonomous as well, but the ancients only mate once a year, so they are the slowest growing of all races. Their government is pretty effective due to the use of more advanced technology to enforce laws, but providing entertainment will be harder since these people require more intelligent entertainment that usually costs more. Every ancient would love to live in a paradise, so terraforming is a higher priority, especially since the ancient can only tollerate a 7.5-12.5 mil atmosphere range is required for ancients to survive without protection.

Difficulty: hard-brutal
Production potential: the best of all races
Main building resource: ore
Terraforming Potential: high
Economic potential: low
Governmental potential: high
research potential: low
growth rate: slowest of all races
Tourist potential: average
Food and water production: high
Micromanagement needs at beginning of game: low, but slow growth rate means that game progress takes the longest.
Colonist eats: food, water
Colonist entertained by: more intelligent entertainment
building method: buildings warped in like reptilians
Optimum atmosphere range: 7.5-12.5 mil
Colonizable atmosphere range: 0-100 mil

6.) Tallorians/rock men
Description: As Sulfur-based lifeforms, the tallorians survive and thrive in the hottest places of the galaxy. Their rocky exoskeletons protect them from any envorinment, but they prefer a hotter, higher atmosphere planet like their homeworld. The wildlife and spectacular views on rock men planets attracts attention from tourism and the rock men make a killing off of novelties. The rock men promote a balanced government, terraforming, and research stance and they have a stellar economy, but where they have an abundance of attention and money, they lack in production and growth.They have a somewhat similar technology to humans, but they use less resources as they are not a production focused raced.

Difficulty: medium-hard
Production potential: low
Main building resource: regolith
Terraforming Potential: average
Economic potential: very high
Governmental potential: average
research potential: average
growth rate: low
Tourist potential: Very high
Food and water production: very low
Micromanagement needs at beginning of game: medium
Colonist eats: ore
Colonist entertained by: human-like entertainment,
building method: buildings warped in like reptilians
Optimum atmosphere range: 20-40 mil
Colonizable atmosphere range: 0-100 mil

I have just put the finishing touches on the v0.75.0 update to My Colony, and will begin pushing it out to all platforms tomorrow (Thursday) morning, possibly even tonight if I get time. This is a huge update in terms of "under the hood" changes, and so there is a lot to cover here. It also marks the beginning of a series of "online" focused updates which will be taking place between now and the end of the year.

Now that My Colony has arrived on Steam (which you can find here), I have decided to shift focus a bit more away from the mobile side of things, towards the Desktop and online side of things. My Colony has always played better on the Desktop, but since the majority of users were on mobile, a lot of the design of the game had to be made with that reality in mind. As some of you already know, a few months ago, Google Play blacklisted My Colony from their store search results, cratering the mobile downloads of the game by over 90%. As a result, the My Colony user base has transformed from over 90% mobile users, to now almost 50/50 with Desktop users, spread out between my website, the Ape Apps Launcher, Windows 10, Chrome OS, Facebook Games, and now Steam. And even though the crash ratings on Google Play are back down under 2% and the downloads have picked back up slightly, it is still nowhere near where it once was. On top of that, the experience did open my eyes as to how Google Play operates, and demonstrated the risk involved with being tied so heavily to one platform. On Desktop, things are spread fairly evenly between the distribution networks (too early to tell on Steam yet), so there is a little bit of safety that comes with that situation. Plus, as I said, the game is just 10 times better on Desktop anyway.

So, just to be clear, I am not abandoning Android and iOS, and those platforms will continue to receive all of the latest updates. I am just not going to be focused on mobile first, and some features may not work on mobile platforms, as you will soon see below.

But enough of the intro, you are here to see what is new in this version, and there is quite a bit. So let's take a look!

First I want to go through some of the bugs that were addressed in this release, as one of them has a pretty large impact on later-stage Human colonies. So during this update, I discovered a mistake in the code that was majorly"nerfing" building consumption and production when the building had a very low "tick" phase. The two prime examples where the Ancient Alien Condenser and the Atmosphere Scrubber, but it would also impact buildings with tons of employees, like the Investment Bank.

Essentially, if the production/consumption tick phase was lower than that of the overall simulation's building tick phase, a bunch of update cycles for that building would get skipped, causing it to produce or consume resources at a far slower rate than it was supposed to. As far as I can tell, this issue has been baked into the game for ages, and when adding new content, I have just set the stats in a way to compensate for it, not even realizing it was there. As soon as I fixed the glitch though, the impact on Atmosphere was immediately apparent.

Ancient Alien Condensers and the Atmosphere Scrubber immediately went into "beast mode", chewing through millions of atmosphere in a matter of minutes. This brought my Atmosphere down to zero, causing all of the condensers in the colony to shut down, since they were out of "fuel". This led to an immediate water shortage which was difficult to get on top of, since I could not generate new atmosphere fast enough to keep up with the consumption of the condensers. I eventually just had to import a ton of water from the Star Gate.

Anyway, to address this, I slightly nerfed the stats on the Condenser, and introduced a new upgraded Large Atmosphere Generator to assist in rebuilding Atmosphere. I kept the Scrubbers running in beast mode though, I figured at their new consumption level, one Atmosphere Scrubber can take care of a pretty good sized colony.

So be aware of this new change, and modify your colony accordingly. I already know the bug reports section will be full of "I updated and now all of my Water is gone" reports, so just be aware of what is happening. It is not exactly a bug, but the result of the fix of a bug.

The next fix is related to Creative Mode in Region games. Basically, it didn't work before, and now it should.

Speaking of Regions, there was a glitch where Resource decay would be greatly amplified on Region maps. This has been corrected. I have also implemented several changes which I hope address the issue people have on Regions where tech/resources are lost. I cannot reproduce this issue on my own, so I hope the fix works. I know you will make me aware if it doesn't though!

Next, a lot of changes were made to the server this update. I am getting ready to add in-game moderators to My Colony, which I had hoped to have ready by now, but the server needed so many changes to accommodate for it, that I just didn't get to it. Just know that it is coming soon though.

The first big change comes with authenticated API calls. Aside from the public API's, you basically need to be logged in to your Ape Apps account to do anything on the server now. This requirement seems like a no brainer, but you have to realize that the My Colony server predates the Ape Apps Account server, and there were originally no account requirements at all.

Due to this change, the tie between your Ape Apps Account, your online colony, and the website is now pretty solid. If you happen to get banned from Ape Apps for some unrelated reason, your colony is pretty much inaccessible too, and you will need to send me an email convincing me why you should be able to get back in.

All colony resources are now stored on the server as well. They have actually been stored on the server for some time, but the server would never override the resources saved to your game file. Now it will. The server now keeps a timestamp and checksum synchronized to your online game saves, so that it can detect if you have decided to go back and restore a backup game file. This is to help detect different forms of cheating that are out there, and while restoring a backup does not flag you as a cheater, it is logged and will be available for review by the soon-to-be-announced in-game moderators.

Next up, in-game private messaging has been moved from the my-colony.com servers to the main ape-apps.com servers. As a result, you can now view and reply to your in-game private messages from right here on ape-apps.com. They will also soon be available on my-colony.com. Currently, they don't render very well on the website, but I will be making it all look pretty shortly. In-game it doesn't look much different from before, but in theory the message size limit is gone, although the game still doesn't let you write more characters. The website does though. In the coming updates though, the entire in-game messaging interface will be rewritten to take advantage of the new features available by using ape-apps.com messaging.

The next big change in the game, which I have mentioned already in another thread and some may not be pleased with, is the complete rewrite of how colonial GDP is calculated. In short, it is now an actual GDP calculation, instead of just the sum of all of your resources. So now instead of measuring just how rich you are, which anybody can attain by simply getting a big gift from another colony or from the Galactic Emperor, it is now a measure of the current productive output of all of your buildings, tax collections, and resource collections. In this way, your GDP only grows if your industrial output is growing. If you are maxed out with full storage, then your GDP will be stagnant. I might adjust it next update to have GBT profits figured into the calculation as well, since it is technically a sale of goods. I haven't decided yet.

The game tracks your GDP over time, and will give you both quarterly and annual prints. It takes about two hours of game time to collect enough data to get a full GDP reading, so be aware of that. In your stats, the large GDP number is your current quarterly rate, and the smaller number is the annual rate. One game "year" is roughly equivalent to one real life hour. The quarterly and annual growth percentages also factor GBT price inflation into their calculations, so that large fluctuations in GBT prices do not throw the GDP growth values way off. In addition, the game ai now has "economic analysts" who will try to guess what your GDP growth rate should be every quarter, based on the trends of the last year, and will let you know each quarter if you were on target or below estimates. It's sort of like watching CNBC.

I might start adding other fun little news items to the GBT price ticker on the bottom of the screen too.

Next, there is a new feature that I hope people are able to have some fun with. I have added the ability in-game to stream a live feed of your game play onto your colony website at my-colony.com. On supported platforms, there will now be a "Streaming" button in the bottom right corner of the screen. When you click on it, it will start up your live feed and turn Red, letting you know that it is on.

It also uses your microphone (if available and you give it permission) so that people watching your stream can hear your amazing voice-over commentary. Also when you turn on streaming, the in-game chat channel and the chat channel on your my-colony.com colony site are synchronized, so that you can text-chat directly with those viewing your feed. You will also get a notification in-game when somebody starts watching your live feed.

The in-game streaming works if you are playing on Chrome, Android, Native Client/Steam. It does not currently work on iOS or Windows 10 (Store) edition of the game. I am not sure about Facebook Game Center, as I did not test it.

Moving on, I have decided to merge the in-game popup Commonwealth and Diplomacy windows into the main Statistics window, so that everything is in one place. In-game private messaging will also be moving to this window soon, and eventually, a revamped in-game encyclopedia will be in there as well. I just think it's better to have all of the options in one tidy place.

You may have also noticed a new "Federation" option at the bottom. Federations are headed in-game to My Colony. I have been promising them for a year and a half now, and since I decided to focus on online play for the next couple of months, Federations went ahead and made the cut.

Creating or joining a Federation requires "government level 7", which is game-engine speak for "you need to build the Hall of Congress." This is pretty much the most expensive building in the game, and before now it hasn't really done anything for you. Now it unlocks Federations. Because of this requirement, only United Earth and LIS can make or join Federations, but Reptilians and Zolarg will be getting their own equivalent buildings in 0.76.0.

The only thing you can do with Federations right now is either make one, or join one. Making one is expensive, and joining one is free. However, when you choose to join a Federation, current federation members receive a ballot in their Federation screen and must vote to approve your membership.

Balloting works like this. When a new measure is put up, it will expire in three days. At the end of three days, the yays and nays are counted, and the winner is determined. However, if a measure receives yays (or nays) from over 50% of current Federation members before the three days are up, the vote is also ended.

The balloting system only works for admitting members right now, but it is going to be greatly expanded. Unlike Commonwealths, Federations are an "alliance of equals", with each independent member state getting 1 vote. One colony will be the president, voted on by the other members. The President will be able to put new initiatives up to a vote, and only the president can put a new initiative up, unless that initiative is a vote of no-confidence in the President, which could be needed if the current president goes inactive.

Federations are going to be able to do things that regular colonies cannot do and, for those who wish to enable it, there is going to be an optional PVP element coming for Federations making use of Star Ships. I am not talking about attacking peoples bases or anything, but you might be able to send your fleet to blockade a planet, disrupt communications, etc. I am welcome to ideas on it, but this element will be 100% optional, and you can only do the PVP mode with Federation members who have enabled it. I want people to still be able to play a 100% peaceful mode if they wish.

The Federations are in the early stages, but there will be new Federation stuff with each update, so feel free to start one up and start accepting members, so you are ready for when the fun stuff goes live.

So those are the primary new things in this update, I am sure there are others, but I don't remember off the top of my head. Now I just want to give a quick update on what is coming next.

As I mentioned, Federations are going to be fleshed out over the next few updates. In addition, both Federations and non-federation planets will be able to establish Trade Routes using their Star Ships, and the Colonial Map from the my-colony.com website is going to be accessible in-game soon to aid in this. There are also new interactions coming for Embassies, some of which will only be available to PVP Federations. To support this, both Zolarg and Reptilians are getting new giant 'Hall of Congress' type building soon, as well as Star Ship production.

There are also going to be further changes made to the My Colony website to accommodate all of the new stuff. Federations will each have their own page, and unlike Commonwealths, there will be a few customization options for a Federation page. If you haven't looked at the My Colony website recently, check it out, I've been adding things here and there over the last few weeks: https://www.my-colony.com/

Finally, in-game moderators are on the way. I have several applications, and will be contacting people with offers as soon as the server is ready for them. There is still a bit of server work I need to do to accommodate what I want to do with moderation, but I think when it's all implemented, it will make the online experience a lot better for everybody.

So that is all for this update. This one took me longer than normal to put together, and I have to spend the next few days catching up on other projects, but I should start v0.76.0 mid next-week. Until then, enjoy the update, and it should be hitting all platforms within the coming days!

Hello again!

Looking back into the commercial and entertainment buildings in MC1, most of them are pretty much optional, since they can be simply replaced by buildings that can churn out billions of money and entertains large masses of people respectively.

As a result, you get pretty plain colonies dominated by very few variety of buildings at the end. This can be a boring sight, to both player themselves and the colonists.

Hence today, I'm presenting my rough idea of start considering colonist quality of life in terms of variety.

By that, I do not mean introducing more classes of "service demands". To keep things relatively simple, and not to complicate the gameplay, the diversity elements has nothing to do and do not share the same mechanics with the 4 existing service satisfaction rating (entertainment, education, health and security), hence not a factor of administrative approval ratings of a settlement, and no coverage mechanics is considered - the diversity elements applies settlement-wide directly.

Now into the details - First, what is a QoL element?
All people of a society have different wants and needs, even a person's demands or wishes can span across multiple aspects of life. What makes a society successful is not just valued by its capability utilizing resources, but also how its people benefits from the fruits of their hard and honest work.
Each QoL element represents an aspect that caters higher needs and improves quality of life of colonists. Below are all the ideas in my mind:

• Homeland Contact
  Some colonists are more comfortable when keep in touch with things they are familiar with, like older social network and family of distant homelands they come from. Some communication infrastructures can satisfy such needs, and if possible, establish interstellar mail and delivery services greatly helps.
  Certain Earth-themed decorations also provides minor improvements of this aspect.
• Social
  What makes a comfortable and forward-going society is a society that people keep socialized and connected that they can support each other. A place large enough for gatherings is just what you need to begin.
• Relaxation
  At times colonists not only need to rest their body, but their strained minds as well. They need a place to clam down and pacify themselves. Having parks and meditation space are the most effective, but many non-vigorous recreational activities such as exercises and grabbing a booze will do the trick as well.
  Certain decorations also provides minor improvements of this aspect.
• Dinning
  Ever getting enough of plain standard rations that your tongue simply rejects it? Then it's time to improve your meals with higher standard cuisines!
• Environmental Comfort
  Simply plain steel plates and concretes everywhere can be depressing. What about some refurnishing to make the colony more beautiful and appealing?
  All decorative buildings improve environmental comfort.
• Housing Comfort
  Home sweet home!
  More advanced housing, particularly those more luxurious, or with high level of automation that smart systems are installed, provides higher housing comfort.
• Games
  From excitement from competitive events to alternative experiences form simulations, they all can diversify a colonist's life experience and provide happiness from achievement.
• Luxuries
  The highest standards of life imaginable or even beyond imagination.
• Commodities Access
  A good flow of commodities, goods and services in local market can effectively take care the smaller demands of colonists.
• Information
  Questions, confusions and lack of options troubles people. Not all directly have the answers, but one can always provide them the ways to find a solution - letting the information flow.
  All education buildings provides some information flow. However, a powerful public media infrastructure provides the largest flow of information that can satisfy the colonists' curiosity.
• Spiritual Support
  Beliefs, faith, religion or even simple psychologist services caters spiritual needs of colonists, which at desperate times, can keep them from depression of dangerous levels.

Next, how do QoL elements works?
Every building yields scores of the life quality aspects they are relevant to, for the settlement they are located. Every colonist also generates demands of every element in their home settlement by 1 point each.
The satisfaction rate of one aspect is calculated by
Then satisfaction level of an aspect is defined based on the percentage value of the satisfaction rate.

Each element will provide Happiness bonuses based on the satisfaction level, which will be explained in the coming section.


Then what do QoL element affects?
QoL elements affects happiness score of a settlement.
Before explaining the QoL elements' actual effects I'll first explain my idea of Colonist Happiness.

Colonist Happiness is a quantitative value which is affected by administrative approval ratings and QoL satisfaction.
My proposed formula:
All settlements begins with base happiness score of 100.
Approval rating is a direct multiplier to all other elements - the changes in approval rating can greatly affect the result happiness score.
To prevent protests and riots, the result happiness score should be maintained above 100.
Every QoL element with at least Poorly Satisfied adds happiness score.
Taxation policies - higher the tax rate, the more happiness is negatively affected. It is a plain negative value factor.
Harsh policies like rationing, martial law and overwork policy applies lower-than-100% multiplier to happiness rating, so use these policies sparingly.

By satisfaction level, a QoL element yields the following happiness score:
remarks: It's rough value without considering other factors and hence it may not be balanced.


How would the QoL diversity (and happiness) mechanics helps with the gameplay? Most important of all, it encourages players to construct buildings (particularly decorations) and resources (that are without large demand and just sitting in stockpiles) normally won't be used. Of course, the new demands arise from QoL needs for raising happiness rating may also give rise to some building ideas. Ultimately this helps with expanding diversity, which can make colonies flying with colors instead of only few buildings.
On the other hand, the QoL elements can pave way as an element for tourism, which the QoL factors or happiness ratings can be attractiveness factor that defines your tourism revenue - a possible way to make tourism more powerful to be a considerable source of income again compared to that in MC1.


This concludes my ideas this time. Hopefully you'll find something useful in my ideas!

Gonna post ALOT of my ideas for the Zolarg faction. As it stands, compared to say... United Earth, the Zolarg tech tree is VERY small.
You can reach it's end in under a day, while United Earth takes atleast a week if you suck sorta, or probly 4-5 days if you know what you're doing.

As it stands, there's currently alot of buildings that don't do much for a "late-game" colony, atleast not as much as it COULD. I will go through each one, and suggest an upgrade for each that currently doesn't exist in any capacity, if I'm wrong on if there's no better upgrade, then let me know!


Brew Pit.
This produces about 2 rum per second, according to my stats page, so that's an estimate, however even with 91 fully staffed and operating, it doesn't equal enough rum to make more than 1 crystalline patch.

Suggested upgrade: Unholy Brew Tank. At the cost of Antaura, Water and Food, this could produce well up to 50 rum per second, and be just as large as a Brew Pit, with probly about 6 workers. Likely could cost Antanium, Antaura, Wood, and Ant Paste, maybe Civics as well.

Suggested Upgrade: Brew Ravine. At the cost of some sugar, water and food, this produces less food than the Unholy Brew Tank and takes up more space, being 1x3 diagonally top right, to bottom left length-wise, but also takes less workers, only 3. Could cost antanium, alot of Civics, Tons of ant Paste, Gold, and maybe Wood.


Supply Pile.
Ofcourse, it increases storage of literally everything, but just by a little bit.

Suggested upgrade: Unholy Pit of Stuff. Would be 2x2, but would store at least 4 times more things than 4 supply piles, since it'd look like a mystic-inspired, cool hole in the ground filled with stuff, and holes hold more than piles.
This wouldn't cost Antaura to run it, but could cost Antaura to build, but less amounts of other resources compared to a money pit, since you've got basically magic doing most of the digging.

Suggested Upgrade: Sugar Matrix of Supply. Could be just as big as a Supply pile, but would contain more, being a tall sugar-powered silo that uses sugar power in ways to miniaturize the contents. (or could be a constant Antaura draw maybe?) Would require workers to keep running, and maybe 50-100 power.


Shrine of Mystics.
Produces Antaura.

Suggested Upgrade: Unholy Temple of Mystics. Would be 3x3 or 4x4, but produces WAY more antuara than a Shrine of Mystics. Needs more workers also, but also could be a tech-required building for other researches.

Suggested Upgrade: Monolith of Mystics. Would remove the worker cost of Shrines, but would cost power and produce more Antaura than a Shrine. It would cost ALOT of antanium, Antaura and Civics to produce, but no Wood whatsoever. Or it could cost no Antaura.


Mound.
Gives 200 population room and produces a decent amount of food per second.

Suggested Upgrade: Unholy Mound of Whorship. Would be a 3x3 building that would likely contain atleast 2 times more, and would produce Antaura instead of Food as an addition.

Suggested Upgrade: Hive. Would be just as large, just a taller structure, and would cost primarily Antanium, Ant Paste, Civics, and Aluminum.


Aluminum Mine
Essentially an endless source of Aluminum, provided you have the time, effort and resources to keep placing them.

Indirect Upgrade Suggestion: Unholy Core Mine. This would be much larger, but uses Antaura to power itself along with alot of power. This could also be an upgrade to the Mining Operation, it could take WAY more workers, but produces a little bit of everything one could get from the ground.


Synthetic Crystalline Patch
A placeable patch of Crystalline, you can get 400 of it from this.

Indirect Upgrade Suggestion: Crystalline Growth Pit. Would be a 3x3-ish structure that costs alot of Rum to run, but produces Crystalline. Would cost Crystalline and Rum, maybe also Aluminum and Ant Paste. Would use Power to increase the growth rate of Crystalline, maybe 200 power?
Could also cause

Indirect Upgrade Suggestion: Crystalline Growth Node. Would be a 1x1 structure that costs Antaura and power to run, requires no workers, but ends up creating Crystalline patches near it that regenerate and expand at a rate needed for high crystalline demands.

Mega Tree
A really big tree that gives 800 wood.

Indirect Upgrade suggestion: Unholy Chamber of Growth. Clones colonists, and produces a bit of everything gained from plants, so wood and sugar mainly. Costs Antaura and power to run alongside a steady supply of water and a decent workforce. Dunno on costs and size.


New Building Suggestion: Pit of Terraforming. Burns wood and Ant Paste consistently in order to produce atmosphere.

Alt Idea: Antauran Utopian Pillar. Costs alot of Antaura to consistently produce atmosphere up to 11 million atmosphere. Or 16 million, either way it produces it up to a point and either temporarily turns off once that point is reached,


New Building suggestion: Gross Shape. Uses Antaura to absorb atmosphere above smog-levels, but looks really gross and wrong. Just a big ball of concentrated pollution. Could produce Pollution as a physical resource.


That's all I can come up with, sorry for the huge wall of text, I just really enjoy Zolarg, and want more to be added, so I'm doing my part as best as I can!

So after the last GDP update, I am unable to understand how the GDP is now calculated. ANd as a result, my GDP stimulation is hard as I don't have a specific method. The one I use now just increases in by a few million every second and isn't consistent by any stretch of the imagination. Does anyone have a good way to consistently increase GDP and/or by more than that? Also if you know how it is calculated, do tell.

@Conco2 The GDP is calculated by the total dollar value of goods produced by your buildings during a specific timeframe. So if your GDP is stalling out, all else unchanged, probably your storage is full for your resources and so your factories basically have no output.

There is no GDP benefit whatsoever to hoarding a ton of resources, so if GDP is your only concern, you have to actually either use or sell the resources you are producing. If you think about it, an economy that stocks a ton of resources and then just lets them sit there rotting, really isn't growing. You need to have exports or use them to build new things.

Gdp depends on the output of your production. The more you produce, the higher the GDP. But if your storage is full and the inflow of resources is higher than the outflow, it will stop the production. Causing the GDP to stagnate or drop. Also it depends on the value of the resources on the market. What often happens is, ppl like messing with it and make the prices drop. Which causes the GDP to drop.

Yesterday and this morning I pushed out the v0.55.0 update for My Colony to all platforms, and it should be arriving to your device as the relevant app stores give their stamps of approval. This is a smaller update than normal, but it still has some goodies. I planned on adding more but everyone in our house has been sick for the last week and I couldn't get myself into the mood to do that much work. Still though, check out what's new in v0.55.0!

My Colony v0.55.0 Changelog

New Stuff

• New Structures: First Aid Station, Trash Transporter, Paste Extractor, Square of Arbitration
• New Occupations: Medic, Arbiter
• New Engine Setting: Low-Res Mode
• Windows Native Client gets a 32bit build

Changes

• Reptilians can now build a slightly modified version of the Insectoid Mining Operation (keep in mind it requires some civics to build)
• Further increased the rate of colonist aging
• Increased the rate of IQ growth at entertainment facilities that offer IQ
• 'Show Workers' list on a building now lets you focus on each individual worker with a new 'View' button
• Lowered the trade capacity of the Reptilian Star Gate

Notes

With this release, Reptilians now have the ability to start generating Civics and Ant Paste. I also nerfed the Reptilian Star Gate a bit, as it really made them too powerful too early on. Next update there will be another host of Reptilian structures, and probably a third Reptilian planet, one that starts with no atmosphere. The game has all of these graphics assets for Reptilians with little purple space helmets on, but they are never used because the current planets both start with full atmosphere. This must be addressed!

Moving on, I have released a 32bit build for My Colony native client on Windows 7/8/10, which you can download on the Ape Market website here: https://market.ape-apps.com/my-colony.html . Now, I do not actually have a 32 bit machine myself, so I have not 100% tested it, but it does install fine on a 64bit machine. If you use 32 bit Windows, give it a try and let me know. The two releases on the download page are clearly labeled 32 and 64 bit, so if you do have a 64bit machine, you should use the 64bit build, as it allows more memory to be used by the game than the 32bit version does.

For Human colonies, a new occupation class has been added, the Medic, and all medical facilities have been updated to use the new Medic class. You can now set pay scale rates for the Medic at your Consulate or Capitol.

In further continuance of the quest to increase performance on lower-end devices, My Colony now has a new Low-Res mode option, which you can find in the Engine Settings menu. Low-Res mode will recompile all game textures to 75% of their native size as they are loaded, thus reducing memory usage and speeding up render times. A lot of progress has been made on reducing processing times for the actual simulation aspects of the game, but if you benchmark the game in your browser of choice, you will see that generally 80% or more of it's processing is taken up by rendering the graphics of the game. Low-Res mode should improve this a little more on slower devices, as does the 'Check Render Distance' option which is already available. On really slow devices which are having troubles keeping their FPS up right from the beginning, the game will now automatically switch into Low-Res mode without input from the user.

Finally, I have increased the rate of IQ and age growth among colonists. I want to start making Age and IQ a factor in the game, but I first need to get the game to where those stats are actually fluid with the population, so I will be making tweaks to Age and IQ over the next few updates, so be aware of that.

One last thing, I have been putting together a small My Colony themed game that will probably come out within the week or so. It is essentially my game My Business Empire but with My Colony themed businesses and an added tech-unlocking system. More details will come in a few days, but this is the closest My Colony will ever be to an 'idle' game 🙂

Anyway, that's all for today. Thanks for playing, and stay tuned for more!

The way I see it is you need to maximise your potential growth space. If you build a 2x2 area (4 crystals), the potential growth area is the perimeter of the 2x2 as internal space is wasted. It only has potential to grow into 12 spaces. If you place these 4 crystals in a chequered pattern, it would have 17 potential growth space thereby maximising the potential. There are patterns to max out the efficiency you need to figure it out. Also if there are 2 blobs of crystals growing, linking them together would increase their growth tremendously.

So I made this list because it is a lot better than the last one...

--------New Tiles/Buildings---------
--short-growing grass-animals cannot eat this grass, but it stays short forever and does not have to be cut, would cost more than normal grass.

--bridges-bridge over rivers and ditches that allow visitors to cross over

--animal bridges-bridge over rivers and ditches that allow animals and vehicles to cross over

--deep rivers-not my idea but I thought it was worth noting, not sure how they would work

--house-2x2 building that the "player"/farmer could live in

--more crops-just more crops in general, not really need yet

--vancy tollbooth-just like the normal version but visitors have to pay more, also vote more to build and decreases attractiveness more

--large silo-stores more than the normal will

---------New Vehicles----------

--large lawn mower-normal lawn mower but 3 wide or 2 wide

--large harvester-normal harvester but 3 wide or 2 wide

--automatic lawn mower-normal lawn mower but mows by itself

---------New People--------

--Rich visitor-pays twice as much for everything but rarely appears

--Famous visitor-pays normal or slightly increased amount but increases attractiveness level temporarily, if unable to leave for too long, disappears

--Farmer/player-doesn't have to be controlable, but lives in house

--------New Animals-------

--Horse-like a cow but eats any

--goat-Like a cow but eats multiple things

--fish-swims in rivers and (maybe) increases attractiveness

--wolf - not my idea

--dog/cat-would be pet of farmers and could follow visitors around for a while (should probably have a limit for how many you can have)

--------New game mechanics------

--encyclopedia - just like the one from My Colony

--chatrooms - just like the ones from My Colony

--weather--
--rain-decreases attractiveness but speeds up from growth
--clouds-basically rain but less effective
--high winds-slowly destroys crops waiting to be harvested(they would still regrow)
--hurricane-would be like a hard mode thing, would pause drop growth, lower
attractiveness to 0, and would scare away any remaining visitors

--hard mode-increases difficulty of game, slows from growth slightly, adds hurricanes, makes every cost slightly more, could add a few "disasters" causes animals to grow slower, harvesters and lawn mowers would eventually break down... Things like that

--easy mode- decreases difficulty of game, increases crop and animal growth, reduces prices, things like that

--land annexation- not my idea, but a great one! would probably work similar to how it works in my colony, just gives you more land

--badges/achievements - this would be cool for My Colony too, you would get an achievement when you "completed" the game, got your first harvester, planted every crop, got a specific amount of cash, and so on...

-----------------that's all!-------------

Just want to say the fish would be cool and I love this game, thank you B A S T!

-KingPenguin5005

Hello everyone, I have just finished up work on My Colony v0.69.0, and it will be going out to all devices shortly.

My Colony v0.69.0 is yet another engine stability and bug fix release. In the last changelog, I talked about how My Colony has been basically blacklisted on Google Play due to having a high number of crashes. To combat this, I made several changes to the Android version of the game, including limiting map sizes, removing ads, removing the Galactic Emperor rewards, etc.

Amazingly, these changes had absolutely zero impact on the crash rate of the game. So most of them have been reversed in this update. My Colony v0.69.0 also rolls up two Antiquitas updates worth of engine patches, including a new Engine setting which allows users to disable the multi-threaded path finding engine.

For those who have been playing a long time, way back in v0.40.0, I moved all path finding operations to a separate worker thread in order to improve performance, and at the time it made a pretty big improvement. The only downfall to this was that it cost more RAM usage in order to work, because the games collision map had to be cloned and copied over to the worker thread in order for the pathfinder to be able to use it, since a Javascript object can not be accessed across two different threads. On PCs with a lot of RAM or on smaller maps, this was not such a big deal. On Android though, which restricts RAM available to each app far more than other platforms, it is possibly problematic, particularly on larger maps.

With this change, multi-threaded path finding is now turned off by default on Android only. I am testing to see if this has any impact on the crash rate. The new engine setting option is found at the very bottom of the Engine Settings list if you want to test the difference between the two path finding methods on different platforms. I suspect this might also help the issues some people have when they order a bot to go build something, and it just sits there. I am thinking the path resolution instructions were somehow getting lost in the cross-thread communications. We will see.

In my testing, turning off the multi-threading does not significantly lower performance. Back when I initially implemented the multi-threaded feature, the game calculated every path for every rover and colonist on the map. I have since made changes to where all paths are simulated, unless the unit starting or ending position is within the players viewport, as there was no reason so show an accurate path of a colonist walking from his house to his job if the player is not even going to see it happening.

There were several more bug fixes added that were carried over from the two most recent Antiquitas updates, but the path finding change was the major one, and represented a somewhat significant change in the underlying code, allowing the game to now support either single or multi-threaded operation.

Hopefully some of these changes do something to help the crash rate. My Colony has a crash rate on Android of around 7%. Oddly, Antiquitas, which runs on the exact same code base, has a crash rate of under 1%. Even more strange is the fact that Antiquitas features background music and higher resolution graphics, leading to more RAM consumption over My Colony, yet there are almost no crashes. Also strange is how I get virtually no support emails or forum posts from actual people about My Colony just force closing on Android, yet it is apparently happening to nearly 10% of users.

Regardless, the ongoing issues on Google Play have basically killed My Colony from a business standpoint. The following snippet from My Colony's weekly usage chart shows the exact point Google blacklisted the game on the Play Store:

Ignore the huge drop at the end, as that represents this week which is only half way through. The game has basically leveled off because that is the usage on Web, Desktop, Windows 10, and iPhone. There are essentially no new downloads coming from Android devices at this point, which as you can tell by the chart, amounted to about half of the My Colony userbase.

Here you can see the last 6 months worth of downloads from Google Play:

So anyway, that is where My Colony currently stands on Android. I have not added any new content this time, as I am trying to focus my time on getting the crashes resolved, if there is indeed any way to resolve them. And even if they are resolved, there is no guarantee that Google would ever un-blacklist the game anyway, so there is that.

Regardless though, there is another small change I added to the game this release. It has always bothered me that the regular textile mill was animated, by the synthetic textile mill was not. So I added animation to it!

So that's all for today. Similar to the v0.68.x series of updates, My Colony on Android will probably receive several more updates than the other platforms. It saw a 0.68.1, 0.68.2, 0.68.3, and a 0.68.4 update, and the same may happen with the release. Just trying to get it fixed. Even if the game never returns to profitability, I at least can hopefully get the engine fixed up so that it works properly for the next game.

Thanks for playing, much more to come!

Thanks for the detailed reply!

1. Tick/s: I estimated the tick/s based on buildings that don't need workers and have a constant production rate. The game was slow at that point. I am on abandoned world and there was a huge expanding forest of sugarcane. I tried to contain them with roads. I did a Fire Drill as well. Whichever the reason, the game was improved. Based on my new Triantanium refinery, it's about 22tick/s (based on 0.65ta/min). It still goes down to below 0.4ta/min from time to time, but it's okay. I should do a smaller map on mobile next time. Anyway, I should have mentioned that I know it is slim chance I can find out the tick/s easily, as it is of no interest for normal gaming purpose.

2. So I presume the overview is the production rate *per minute* at the moment I open the menu?

3. For Regolith Extraction Inc., 0.8667 Re/tick equate to 1040re/min. Based on my observation it was closer to 20-40re/min. My vertical warehouse farming also gave a figure way lower than 7f/tick.

For vertical warehouse farming, I hope it's a bug, as the cost of it should justify 7f/tick. As for Regolith Extraction Inc., the current rate (20-40) seems right. Ore Zapper, being more advanced, gives 720re/min, so no way should the REI gives 1040re/min.

Also, for Alien Plastic Factory, while the code/reference say it does not require worker, the actual production rate is definitely boosted by the number of workers based on observation. Otherwise the plastic production rate is even lower than Plastic Factory!

(I'm confused though - since the game is run based on the code, how could it behave differently from the code? for clarity, I know very little about coding and I read js more as a database than code)

4. Cool. I could have fire people from hydrogen reactors if I need people working elsewhere, but as you predicted, they are obsoleted in my current game now (by alien power tower and diamond crystal reactor). I'll try it when I have arcology soon.

**
new question:
5. Are colonists' home and work place fixed once they got a job, or are they changing dynamically as new house/work are built? Should I be worried that creating houses and jobs at different ends of the colony at the same time would lead new colonists having a very long commute distance?
***

I got Center for Relics Studies! Now grind triantanium, looking forward to Star Gate. I was quite disappointed in UDD tbh, the boost from dig site is so small. The upgrade is more like for the automatic clay production.

I really like the game so far. I have been playing Kittens Game, and there is slightly (very slight) similarity in progression, in terms of solving one bottleneck lead to another bottleneck, and most building has its varying importance at different stages of game. Of course, Kittens Game is an incremental games with reset/prestige and this is a city building game, so the gameplay is very different.

I feel that the game need work on game balance on at least 2 buildings: (1) food processing sweatshop is crazy (385k food/min?!) (at least on Abandoned World where sugar is abundant) (2) Alien Enrichment Facility is disappointing (huge fuel increase but with only x5 production increase and space-saving). but these are minor to the overall gameplay and maybe it's just specific to the type of colony I'm playing in.

@colbya I indeed dont have the highest population but my GDP is the highest in the game. All of united earth together has about 11 pentillion and Betelgeuse Financial Services Ltd. has 9 Pentillion in the bank. Betelgeuse, my main colony has over 30 Pentillion, but the game doesnt refresh the colony website for amounts over 10 pentillion.

So: 4th largest by population but 1st and 2nd by GDP. (There might be somebody with more whose GDP also doesnt refresh anymore, but I haven't heard of that by now)

But still thanks for the Science fact :) Send me your embassy and lets work together!

buildings have (rn, bast will remake the GDP so that production per time makes the GDP, not resources you have) no effect on the GDP. It's only how many resources you on your colony have

Now we have:

City 1: 1B
City 2: 2B
City 3: 1B

Region GDP = sum(City1, City2, City 3) = 4B

But the value need to be valuated for each city independently.


I suggest, only for region map (individual city don't need it) a overall GDP layer based on the total production, the system will only see the production, and ignore the resources consummated.

Instead to record a static gdp value, the system will examine the resources produced, or better, only the total value converted in money.

Oh I understand :)

Right now it computes the gdp inside the city, like if you produce 100 nanites per min and the price is 1000 per 100 you will get a gdp of 1000. But if the price of nanite goes up to 2000 per 100 it won't update (if you don't enter the city to refresh the calculation) yet the gdp of the city should be 2000.

Am I correct?

Yes, now we have a static gdp, and i propose a dynamic gdp. Maybe can be the max production in a 30min-1h time windows, not every 60s.

I still don't understood why the base resources value change all the time.. even if i open the online market (lis version, League trade authority), the value change.. for this reason we have a gdb leader-board without any sense, player with 1Q gdp instead 50T max, or 200-300T, instead 60-70T...

This might be a long shot, and I'm not sure if it's been mentioned before, but here goes:

Using statistical calculations, bast could implement a population growth rate that is independent of immigration or tourism. This rate of growth would be extremely slow and would speed up in relation to the amount of colonists that you have living in your colony, while still being pretty slow even for a large colony.

The colonist would start out with zero iq and would not need a place to live or a job until they reach a certain iq. When they are spawned, they would start to receive a periodical supply of money from the two parent colonists that spawned them and would use that to buy food and water. Bast could also draw them as tiny colonist sprite. The priority for them would be to seek out constant supply of education, but would also need entertainment as well.

The reason why I say that they don't need a home would be because it is assumed that they would be living with one of their parent colonists.

Also, when the planet is fully terraformed, bast could put further purpose toward the family houses that one can build. Two colonists living in one of these homes would have a very good chance of spawning another colonist.

The reason why I wanted to recommend this idea was that just in case you can't pay your charter tax, you can still grow as an isolated colony, albeit very slowly. I mean, in real life, that's what would happen if a colony were to get isolated, eventually people would be born and the population would increase, but over the course of years.

Let me know what you think.

This might be a long shot, and I'm not sure if it's been mentioned before, but here goes:

Using statistical calculations, bast could implement a population growth rate that is independent of immigration or tourism. This rate of growth would be extremely slow and would speed up in relation to the amount of colonists that you have living in your colony, while still being pretty slow even for a large colony.

The colonist would start out with zero iq and would not need a place to live or a job until they reach a certain iq. When they are spawned, they would start to receive a periodical supply of money from the two parent colonists that spawned them and would use that to buy food and water. Bast could also draw them as tiny colonist sprite. The priority for them would be to seek out constant supply of education, but would also need entertainment as well.

The reason why I say that they don't need a home would be because it is assumed that they would be living with one of their parent colonists.

Also, when the planet is fully terraformed, bast could put further purpose toward the family houses that one can build. Two colonists living in one of these homes would have a very good chance of spawning another colonist.

The reason why I wanted to recommend this idea was that just in case you can't pay your charter tax, you can still grow as an isolated colony, albeit very slowly. I mean, in real life, that's what would happen if a colony were to get isolated, eventually people would be born and the population would increase, but over the course of years.

Let me know what you think.

After several weeks of work and dealing with a suspension from Google Play, My Colony is back with patch v0.98.0, the Zolarg Update! The Zolarg have long lagged behind the Human races in terms of content, and they are still behind with this patch, but the gap is closing, and will continue to close in the months ahead. But this is a good step in the right direction, as this update adds 20 new structures to the Zolarg lineup, as well as a couple of new techs and units, and access to the Abandoned World map. There are a couple of other goodies thrown into the mix as well, so let's take a look at what is new!

Firstly, My Colony is now available to players on the Kongregate platform, which you can find by clicking here. So if you get a new commonwealth member who plays on Kongregate, be sure to welcome them to the My Colony family!


Next up, there has been a long-standing bug related to Entertainment, Medical, and Education stats on certain buildings. This was only reported by certain players, but after finally isolating the bug, I believe more people were probably experiencing the issue, even if they did not realize it. Essentially, a certain condition would lead to a routine in the code that was supposed to check if a building had more guests/students/patients than the building allows, and instead of a greater than symbol in the code, I had accidentally typed an equals sign, which was altering the in-memory game definition for the building class in question, changing the number of guests/students/patients that the game thought the building allowed. This would actually have far reaching effects throughout the entire colony, making entertainment buildings think they did not accept guests, and so on. The game would be fine again once the game definitions were reloaded from memory, but would get messed up again during gameplay.

So anyway, that bug is now fixed. Things like that are easy to miss when there are tens of thousands of lines of code to deal with! Really though, the impact should have been pretty deep on most colonies, so do not be surprised if there are changes to the way the simulation runs now going forward.

I have made a tweak to the existing Zolarg Customs Processing structure, increasing the rate that it receives tourists by about 2.5x. It was just taking forever for new Tourists to arrive on Zolarg maps, and there was no real reason why the building needed to be so slow to begin with.

So now we move on to the new Zolarg content. Since there is so much, I am just going to list everything out and then offer an overview in the following commentary.

New Techs

• Mega Construction
• Insectoid Dominion

New Units

• Regobug
• Etherbug

New Structures

• Polished Water Vats
• House of Running Rum
• Labor Camp
• Megamound
• Potterbug's Mound
• Deluxe Command
• Unholy Tower of Stuff
• Glazed Mound
• Smart Power Spire
• Quantum Slab of Processing
• Quantum Wet Cone
• Quantum Circuit Foundry
• Unholy Gold Grower
• Crystalline Growth Chamber
• Tower of Truth
• Antanium Blast Furnace
• Ether Powertube
• Designated Swim Area
• Regolith Incinerator
• Pot of Ether

To start with, I wanted to address some of the long-standing complaints with Zolarg maps. One of the big ones was the super low giftcap as compared to other civs. With that in mind, Zolargs have gained another upgrade to their Capitol structure, the Deluxe Command.


This brings the Zolarg gift capacity up to 500,000,000, which I believe is reasonably sufficient for any colony. Likewise with storage, Zolarg get another large boost with the upgraded Unholy Tower of Stuff, which has a capacity of 3,500,000 for most goods.

For power generation, Zolarg gain two new power plants, the upgraded Smart Power Spire and the new Ether Powertube. The Ether Powertube is the most powerful, offering 12,000 power generation, but it requires Ether to operate. This is no problem on the Abandoned World map which the Zolarg can now populate, but the structure will otherwise require receiving a gift of Ether or purchasing it from the GBT. There will be more Ether specific structures coming to the other civs as well, and I plan on adding other map-specific resources to other planets too, as I have previously outlined a few months ago.

For those who can't get Ether though, the also-new Smart Power Spire still offers 3,500 power generation, making it no slouch either. Realistically, it would only take a handful of Smart Power Spires to run a full medium sized map.

Zolarg can now be played on the Abandoned World map, which required the addition of the new Regobug and Etherbug, as well as the ability to convert Regolith into Ore using the new Regolith Incinerator.


Now I would rate a Zolarg Abandoned World as "not for beginners," as without proper management, you will quickly run into shortages of Food, Water, and Sugar right off the bat. Ore production is also expensive in terms of Sugar and Regolith, at least until you unlock other Ore generation methods. It is the only map though where Ether can be obtained (for any civ), and it should be fully playable once you get past the initial stages.

Zolarg Alien Tech gets a boost in this update, with much needed "quantum" upgrades for several existing structures. Zolarg also gain Pottery production, automated Wood harvesting (through the new Labor Camp), and automated Crystalline generation (through the Crystalline Growth Chamber). All of these changes make running a Zolarg resource farm a lot less of a chore than it was before.

Obviously there is still a lot more to do with Zolarg, but this update does make it a lot better. Once Zolarg are up to speed on most of the resource generating buildings, they will also need to be filled out with regular diversity type buildings. Things Humans have that make a colony not look so uniform and bland, multiple ways to create and use resources in different combinations. This will all come, it just takes a bit of time!

So there is still a lot more coming for Zolarg in the future, but not in the next update. v0.99.0 will be focusing on the Reptilians, and they will be getting a similar "shot in the arm" that the Zolarg just got in this release. Following that, My Colony will finally be hitting v1.0.0, and I am going to finally stop calling it Beta. I figure after 100 feature updates and countless platform-specific bug updates (152 on Android alone), the game can finally be referred to as 1.0, lol.

To celebrate the 100th feature release of My Colony, I plan on doing a special public edition of the My Colony podcast, where anybody in the community will be free to join me for the recording session, as we discuss the past 3 1/2 years of My Colony and talk about the future! I am either going to use Discord for the recording, or embed recording and group voice capabilities into the My Colony streaming mechanism and record the Podcast while I stream gameplay. I haven't decided yet, but after research, I think adding the capabilities to the site would be trivial. It's just a matter of whether or not I want to take the time to implement them :-/

So anyway, that is all for today's update. It should be rolling out to all platforms over the coming days, so be on the lookout! As always, leave your feedback and suggestions, and stay tuned, because there is a whole lot more My Colony to come!

https://mc1.my-colony.com/api.php?pf=2&g=1&c=0hZgBkjn
(replace 0hZgBkjn with desired charter code)

Returns JSON formatted data on specified colony, as well as mother colony and list of child colonies.

{

    "charter":"EfbgdYs6",

    "name":"EMERALD CITY",

    "civilization":"United Earth",

    "race":"Human",

    "maptype":"Red Planet",

    "founded":"December 16, 2016",

    "independence":"December 18, 2016",

    "population":24718,

    "gdp":1484542777812088300,

    "unemployment":0,

    "mapstage":4,

    "playson":"web",

    "lastactive":"2017-04-28 09:42:03",

    "theme":"#2867ed",

    "screenshot":"https://www.my-colony.com/screenshots/ss-146399.jpg",

    "website":"https://www.my-colony.com/colonies/EfbgdYs6/",

    "sector":"0,1",

    "location":"-90,-442",

    "rrr":72,

    "mothercolony": {

        "name":"United Earth",

        "charter":"earth",

        "website":"https://www.my-colony.com/colonies/earth/",

        "relations":100,

        "sector":"0,0",

        "location":"0,0"

    },

    "childcolonies": [

        {

            "name":"TouristsDieHere",

            "charter":"GE7RmoX0",

            "population":76189,

            "website":"https://www.my-colony.com/colonies/GE7RmoX0/",

            "relations":92,

            "sector":"0,0",

            "location":"0,0"

        }

    ]

}

• charter: charter code
• name: colony name
• civilization: what civ they are playing as, like United Earth or Zolarg Empire (so far)
• race: what species they are.  so far there are human and zolarg.  eventually there may be more than one civilization per race
• maptype: what map they are playing, like Red Planet, Lunar, etc
• founded: when the colony was founded
• independence: when they gained independence, or "0" if they are not independent
• population: their population
• gdp: their total gdp
• unemployment: unemployment rate, times 100, ie  5% would be 5 and not .05
• mapstage: what their atmosphere level based stage is
• playson: what platform they last used, like web, android, ios, windows, desktop 
• lastactive: timestamp of when they last played
• theme: the theme color they chose in their colony website options
• screenshot: if they uploaded a screenshot, the url will be here
• website: the url to their colony website
• sector: the x,y coordinate of what sector their colony is located in
• location: the x,y coordinate of where they are located within the above sector
• rrr: the RRR index of the colony ( http://forum.ape-apps.com/showthread.php?tid=1994 )
• mothercolony.name: name of their mothercolony
• mothercolony.charter: charter for their mothercolony
• mothercolony.population: the population of their mothercolony
• mothercolony.website: mothercolony website
• mothercolony.relations: the relation percentage the colony has with their motherland, times 100, ie 95% = 95, not .95
• mothercolony.sector: the x,y coordinate of the sector their mother colony is in
• mothercolony.location: the x,y coordinate the mother colony is in within their sector
• mothercolony.rrr: the RRR index of the colony ( http://forum.ape-apps.com/showthread.php?tid=1994 )
• childcolonies (array, from largest to smallest):
• childcolonies[x].name: name of child colony
• childcolonies[x].charter: child colony charter code
• childcolonies[x].population: child colony population
• childcolonies[x].website: website for the child colony
• childcolonies[x].relations: percent relation that the child colony has with parent, times 100, ie 95% = 95, not .95
• childcolonies[x].sector: x,y coordinate of the sector child colony is in
• childcolonies[x].location: x,y coordinate of the child colony location within their sector

So today I am pushing out a new My Colony release, v0.74.0. This is mainly a bug fix and stability release, as I didn't add any new Reptilian buildings this time around. v0.74.0 is also the build that will be going out to Steam at the beginning of November, so those who have been waiting for the Steam release should add it to their wishlist using the following link, to help give the game a good boost out the door:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/964130/My_Colony/

That said, there are some new goodies on board with this update that some of you should appreciate. Let's take a look at what has changed with v0.74.0!

First, I did a bit of tweaking with the IQ/Education stuff. For starters, several of the buildings that required ultra-high IQ's have been slightly dialed back a bit. In addition, there is now a change that jobs will actually hire workers who are not quite smart enough to work there, sort of like in real life. These workers are placed in a new "on the job training" mode, where they still help production, just a bit slightly less than a normal worker. However, their IQ slowly increases while at work, as their company takes on the responsibility of their education. To a lesser extent, all regular employees get a slight IQ boost at work now too, as it is assumed that people pick up a bit of knowledge while they work.

Next up, there is a brand new engine setting that I know a lot of people will appreciate. You can now turn off (or on) the popup notifications that are active during online play (xxx is online, starvation in xxx, etc). I already reduced the occurrence of these in the prior update, but now if you want, you can just turn them off altogether.

Another fix that people will be happy about, is that Region games now properly report GDP and unemployment figures to the My Colony server. The GDP figures are the sum of all GDP's in the region, while the unemployment figure is the average unemployment across all region cities (weighted by the population of each city).

Next up, if you've ever wondered how much money a colonist needs before they retire, now you can find out. In the Economic Statistics screen, there is a new Retirement Savings Cutoff statistic. Any colonist whose savings go above this level will likely enter into retirement and stop working until either a) they die, or b) they fall back under the cutoff.

The savings cutoff changes pretty often based on global market prices. For those wondering how that price is derived, it is essentially the current average GBT price of a set amount of Food, Water, Rum, Cloth, and Toys. Everything a colonist needs to enjoy their golden years.

Also in this update, I have increased the rate at which unhappy colonists will utilize entertainment facilities. Before, it was not uncommon to have entertainment go 90%+ unused, but now if your colonists need it, they will be more likely than before to utilize it.

At last, I have made some changes to the save game code, in hopes to reduce the occurrence of corrupted game files. I don't know why some people experience this a lot more than others, but I added some additional stat logging to try to pin down exactly how and why it is happening, and I have also added some changes that might make it better too, but we will see if they worked over the coming days.

So that is it for today's update. There will be an extended delay between the next update as My Colony works its way through the Steam approval process. After that, things will be back to normal again. Until then, enjoy the update, let me know what issues you find, and thank you for playing My Colony!

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Astro Corporation is a proud member of the First Future Federation and is dedicated to the growth and prosperity of our Colonies.

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The problem with the population is that growth out strips housing capacity, creating children who consume resources and give nothing in return. You have to spend resources to sustain the population, which merely leads to increased growth that requires more resources in turn which only serves to slow down the game. I think there needs to be a radical overhaul to impose a stable population.

1) Population control policies such as deportation should be made available immediately after getting a government building like the consulate or colonial assembly, not buildings that require a massive investment of research, civics and resources.
2) There should be options to limit growth such as one child per person or outright sterilization.
3) There should be buildings that let you process the surplus population into food and water, if the citizens insist on eating like pigs and breeding like rabbits, they deserve to be slaughtered like them to.

Hello people, back with another idea. It comes directly out of the sim city playbook.

A new colony should have the ability to take out a loan from their commonwealth when they need it at the commonwealth's approval. When the new colony takes out a loan, they and their commonwealth would also have to agree on the amount of payments and the interest rate that the loan would have.

After the loan is taken out, the player can contribute to the loan at will, or they can wait until they are required to start making payments. When it comes time for the player to make payments, the payments and interest rate could either be added to the colony taxes amount to make it simple for the lendee, or they could be on their own separate bill. I wouldn't worry too much about trying to calculate what portion of each payment is interest, just have them make flat payments with an added interest fee based on their interest rate of the loan.

The interest factor of the loan is purely there to motivate commonwealths to loan money, because they would receive more money in return, and you might have some commonwealths that turn into loan sharks for the sake of making money. If a commonwealth and it's loaning colony have very close ties or the two players are very close or even relatives, the interest rate could be set to 0, but I would still have it for the benefit of the lender.

In fact, what if we could make it so that one commonwealth can loan to another commonwealth through the use of the embassy? It would allow commonwealths to make money by lending to other commonwealths, and some commonwealths could even become loan sharks for the purpose of making money.

This planet type is basically a Mercury-type planet. A rocky planet with a rocky core instead of an iron one, and a very close proximity to the sun. The sun beats down on Mercury's surface, cooking the day side to extremely high temperatures. Mercury turns at 2 mph so you can imagine the days and nights to be extremely long and to have drastic differences. The nights are very cold, while the days are hot and radioactive enough to cook a man/insect/reptile in his skin. For the sake of simplicity though, I wouldn't worry about planetary rotation or temperature change from night to day times. Instead we will focus on the radiation exposure that the colonists will get, and challenge the player to find ways to reduce and eventually deflect radiation from areas that are highly populated or traversed.

New colonist stat: Rads: This stat affects the max health and energy of the colonist. As this stat climbs, their max health and energy falls. Eventually, if the exposure get's too much, their max health will become 0 and they will die instantly. I don't think that this is going to violate any fallout/bethesda copywrite/trademarks because this is on a different planet and doesn't involve nuclear warfare. Radiation exposure would only happen during daytime and would subside at night.

New building type: electromagnets: these buildings will reduce the rate at which colonists gain rads in a certain radius. As the player progresses, he can get better magnets with better reduction power and better radius's. In fact, the alien magnet would completely deflect all radiation in a very wide area. These buildings require tons of power and possibly artifacts for the alien one.

New building type: radiation treatment centers: these would use the latest technology to reduce colonists rad count. The first center should be added very early in the game since outside of the rover, new colonists arrivals would have no way to heal since the first magnet type would not be very powerful and they would still gain rads at a fast rate.

Lander: The lander provides impervious resistance toward radiation for colonists while they are inside of it, and it heals these colonists once they come back in at a very fast rate, faster than the most advanced radiation treatment facility actually. This would be to ensure that at least two people would survive if everyone else died of radiation poisoning. Just be sure not to give them big commute distances. This is also to give the lander another fundamental purpose so people don't destroy it.

New resource: Magnetite: An untradable resource that will be used to build magnets that reduce/deflect solar radiation from certain areas. Magnetite is not found on the surface in the form of nodes, the player must create temporary mines that allow them to collect it. This requires a new tech called "Solar Wind deflection theory." Eventually the player will get the core driller, which would provide a steady stream of magnetite as a side effect.

New vehicle: mag rovers: These guys are used to build magnetite mines and gather magnetite from them.

New Tech: Solar Wind deflection theory: unlocks the collection and use of magnetite to build electromagnets to reduce colonists exposure to solar radiation.

New Tech: Core conditioning: unlocks structures that are used to dig down to and change the makeup of the planet's core, specifically to molten iron so that it can generate a powerful and permanent magnetic field.

New Terraforming stats: Distance to core and core viscosity:Distance to core determines how far down the core driller has gone and how much distance it has before it can be upgraded to a core filler. The core viscosity stat determines the base rad exposure rate that a colonist would be subjected to if they were to be outside the range of all magnets on the map. As this stat lowers, the base rad exposure lowers, until eventually both equal 0 and the planet now has a working and permanent magnetic field.

New buildings: Core driller and core filler: These two core buildings will be responsible for drilling down to the core and filling it with molten iron so that the planet develops a powerfull magnetic field of it's own.

Core driller: Has a change to produce massive spurts of either ore, gold, alu, or ura at the end of each worker round and would provide a constant supply of magnetite. The deeper the driller digs(based on the distance to core stat), the better chance for better resources and better amounts of resources. Subtracts from the "distance to core" terraforming stat. There can be only one core driller on the field at a time.

Core filler: once the core driller has reduced the distance to core to zero feet, it can be upgraded to a core filler. This building consumes massive amounts of iron and uranium to both fill and heat the core. The core filler decreases the core viscosity stat. Once the stat reaches 0, radiation comes a thing of the past and the player can now work on planetary atmosphere if they haven't done so already. The core filler can only be obtained via upgrading the core driller, it cannot be built on it's own, thus it should not be added to the build menu.

Resources: This planet contains all of the resource nodes that are found on Red planet. The only new resource that would be added here, and untradable(since it wouldn't be needed elsewhere) is magnetite. There should be no added difficulty regarding resources or any more bottlenecks than usual besides maybe a bottleneck concerning magnetite. This will be a planet that either UE or LIS can colonize. Since there is no atmosphere, zolarg are out of the picture, and so are reptilians since their slaves don't have space suits yet.

----------------

Right now this is just a concept that I am sharing with everyone. I have no images to help my cause on this one as of yet, and I don't have much time for now to draw anything since drawing takes me hours to do that I don't have. If you like this idea, please vote on it or send us some pictures that could be put in the game if this idea is even partially used.


.

What I mean by that is when I’m not in city x and I am in city y, the resources that are produced by city x will be produced at a much slower rate (than when I’m in city x) while I am in city y. For example: city x normally produces steel at a rate of 1000 per minute, but when I am in city y steel is being produced at a rate of 10 per minute (considering that city y has no steel producing facilities).
I can see this being a major problem when the player has separate cities focused on producing a certain resource. He could have a city focused on making food, and, while he is in another city, his food production rate will drastically slow down and he will start having problems keeping the colonists alive.

Also, when I am in the screen where I can see all of my cities, resource production stops completely. I don’t know if resource consumption continues, but I hope not.

On android Samsung galaxy a5 phone and I think it is also happening on the windows version of the game

I have just completed work on My Colony v0.72.0, which should be going out to all platforms over the next few days. This release contains a whole slew of general bug fixes, both region and non-region related, as well as a few new structures and a new change to unemployment.

Firstly, I think that I may have finally solved the long-standing "my rovers wont move" bug, which people have been complaining about for a year or so. Now that I have written this, there may well be 10 comments below proving that I have not solved it, but I am pretty sure that at least it is a lot better now than it was before. The issue is that some time ago, I added code so that the engine would save commonly used paths and re-use them again instead of going through the pathfinder every time, which saved a lot of cpu usage. Somehow though, I forgot to clear out those saved paths whenever new structures or terrain features were added to the map. So if a path was ever created, and then later on, a building got placed somewhere along the path, the game would go back and try to find a new path, but the engine kept giving out the old retained path over and over again. The retained path would eventually be killed if it failed enough times, but this was creating a constant loop where sometimes rovers would just sit there trying the same path over and over again, or if a ton of rovers were moving at once, they would completely lag out the game while they each tried to resolve the same broken path over and over.

So anyway, there is a better than zero chance that this issue is fixed now, but please (and I am sure you will) let me know if I am mistaken.

Next on the list, I have implemented a change in employment reporting. Before, if a colonist did not have a high enough IQ to take a job, they would become a student. If there were no schools available, they would just keep looking for an education until they could find one. This had a couple of effects. One, it could create lag on large colonies where colonists kept looking for schools over and over. Additionally, it created higher rates of unemployment while there will still jobs available. Players would wonder why colonists are not filling jobs when there are so many workers available, when the actual reason is that many of the colonists were too dumb to work in the jobs that were unfilled.

To address these issues, several changes were made. Now if a colonist cannot find a job, they will look for school once. If they can't find it they will either a) go to the bar and drink their woes away (find entertainment instead), or b) lose faith in your government and become a protester. Later on when they have become sufficiently happy again, or tired of protesting, they will retry their search for a job or school.

Next, the way unemployment is calculated has been changed. Before, unemployment was simply the number of colonists minus the number of filled jobs. Pretty simple. The issue was that since the simulated colonists (new colonists created after your population passes 2000) found jobs and lived their lives based on statistics from the non-simulated colonists, the unemployment rate in some cases would be artificially high as it was counting students and retired colonists as workers, and so simulated colonists were not finding jobs since their employment rate was coded to match the rate of the non-simulated population. Now, students and retired workers are no longer counted among the unemployed. These stats are now reflected on the statistics screen.

In addition, the unhappiness stats now account for colonists who cannot find an education. These stats were previously not accounted for, skewing the other statistics higher than they normally would have been.

In the coming updates, I want to add new colonist births, and also accelerate the rate of aging among the population. I then plan to include nonage and dotage into the population, where colonists will not work under the age of 16 or over the age of 70, or some other arbitrary numbers. Perhaps these numbers can be set in a new social policy.

For players of the desktop Native Client, all script errors should now be written to a .log file saved in the ~/Documents/My Colony folder on the device. Key word should.

Finally, the Reptilians got three new structures in this release. They finally have an embassy to establish diplomatic missions, the Foreign Outpost. In terms of regular structures, they get the Potters Den, which is a small housing unit which also creates pottery. Also they get a public housing structure, the Homeless Shelter, which also provides a mediocre education to those who live there.

One last word about the Android crashes before I wrap up here. From the stats I have gathered, it appears that over 90% of the crashes happen in offline games vs online games. I am wondering if this is related to the game scanning WiFi for nearby players to trade resources with. I have added some potential fixes related to the TCP/IP networking, but whether or not that have an impact remains to be seen.

That's all for today's update. Thanks for playing, and stay tuned for more!

I am finally putting the finishing touches on the My Colony v0.86.0 patch, which should be hitting all devices within a few days. I had planned for this to be a huge exciting content update, but then once I started working on it, I began running into one problem after the other and it ended up taking way longer to complete than I had anticipated. As a result, there are a lot of engine changes in this update but no content additions, so from the outside it may look like I've spent the last two weeks doing nothing. Rest assured though, there are some improvements to the game in this release, so let's take a look!

The first major change, which actually inadvertently started a domino effect of changes to the engine, was a total rewrite of the way the game saves files. As most of you know, when My Colony first came out there was no such thing as Regions, and so the concept wasn't even considered during game saving. Once Regions came out, many of the engine mechanics had to change to accommodate having multiple game objects processing at the same time (the individual city you are playing, the region itself, and the minor updates to the surrounding region files).

With all of these changes happening to different game objects at the same time, the game saving function remained the same as before. I sort of duct taped a solution together which worked pretty good for the most part. For instance, I had never personally run into any major issues with saving a Regions game. However, there were always reports of problems with saving in Regions, particularly with Resources and Technology levels not saving. This is unique to Regions, as it shares a single Resource and Technology pool among many different game files.

In addition to Regions, the structure of the game itself has changed considerably over the last three years, and over time, layers upon layers of different ideas have been cobbled together in the code creating a mess of sorts. To resolve all of this, I decided to completely change the manner in which game data is saved to the system. The new method allows making saves to multiple game objects at a time, instead of just the currently active game object. For example, prior to this update, when you were playing a region, the overall Region file did not save until you chose "Exit to Region" from the game menu. With this new update, you no longer have to Exit to Region for all regional data to be saved.

This is all well and good, but I didn't anticipate, or rather appreciate, just how many parts of the code were tied into the previous game saving functions. This lack of preparation on my part led to a major issue in the pre-release code on Ape Web Apps where saving a regional city would cause all colonists to lose their jobs and become homeless. Which is not good. It was like doing a fire-drill with each save, except after the fire-drill, the colony would never recover. So that was fun, and working through that led me on a breadcrumb trail that resulted in little changes and fixes all throughout the engine.

As if that wasn't enough though, I also decided to make major changes to the way virtual colonists work. Virtual Colonists are the "colonists" in your colony when your population exceeds 2000. These colonists do not actually exist, but the game instead uses statistics to simulate their education, housing, entertainment, and industrial output. With today's changes, the accuracy of this simulation should be greatly increased, especially in regards to education, which was barely simulated before.

On top of those significant engine changes, I also decided to completely rewrite the way colonists find jobs! I know, too many big changes for one update. There were so many changes here that I could write a whole article about it, but to avoid putting you to sleep, I will give the general overview. With this latest update, the game now keeps track of a "now hiring" list, sort of like a classified advertisement page. Whenever a business has an open job, it adds a now hiring record containing the x:y location of the job, the IQ requirement, pay, etc. Whenever a colonist doesn't have a job, the game takes the now hiring list, and sorts it for that colonist based on location from their house, how it matches their IQ, how it pays, etc. They then start at the top of the list and apply for the jobs. If the job is within a certain range of their house (40 tiles I think) and they meet the requirements, they will take the job. If they don't find one, they will lower their standards a bit. If they still don't find one, they will enroll in school. If they don't find a school to enroll in, they will be mad and complain about lack of education.

This change actually works pretty good, but there is a computational penalty when sorting the job openings. When only a handful of colonists are looking for jobs, it's no big deal. But if you conduct a fire-drill and the entire colony looks for work at once, you might experience a lag in the game of several seconds or more. I will need to look into a fix for this at some point soon.

Ok, so that addresses the bulk of the engine changes I made. There are some other little things here and there that you might notice, as I actually changed so much that I can't remember it all. But since there were so many changes, I would expect to see bugs as a result. Please let me know in the forum what you find!

Let's move on to non-engine related changes. First off, on the main Region city selection screen, the game now shows the name of the city on the overall map.

I will probably add a toggle to turn this on/off, I just did not get to it this time. This is mainly for mobile/touch players, since they don't have a mouse and therefore do not see the mouse-hover popup box that Desktop players see on this screen, making it hard to tell which colony is which.

Next up, I have consolidated most of the Commonwealth management settings into the main Commonwealth section of the statistics screen, so you no longer have to dig through the Policy menu to find everything.

If you look closely at the above, you will probably also notice the next thing I added. That's right, you can now finally change your Commonwealth Tax Rate! This has been requested since Commonwealths first came out, and I apologize for not adding it sooner, but it's there now. I have also capped the Commonwealth Payroll Assistance at 500%, since some of the levels on the server were insane.

Moving on, I have added a new feature called Layout Templates. This is mainly for Regions, but you can now save a "Template" of your current map and export it to the file system to share with other players. When you activate a template on your map, you see a ghosted image of the template buildings overlayed on your colony (you can turn the image on/off) that you can use as a guide for building. This is mainly for players who have designed certain build layouts and want to share the layout with others. I imagine it would work best on an empty regional map with no resources. You can find the template options on the bottom of the General Statistics screen.

There is a new engine setting that allows you to turn Gamepad input on or off. It has always been turned on from the beginning, but there was a concern that if you were playing another game on your desktop while My Colony was open, My Colony would be processing the gamepad inputs from the other game. If you find yourself in this situation, you can now turn off gamepad input completely from the Engine Settings screen.

There have been some minor changes to Colonist processing. Entertainment facilities now increase energy and happiness at a faster rate. In addition, colonist happiness will also slightly increase when they are at home. I have also increased the starting colonist IQ range to make them a bit smarter by default (will not impact current colonists, only new arrivals). And finally, I have further increased the rate that colonists age, since I still think it's too slow.

And last but not least, there were a couple of changes to existing buildings. The Mass Driver trade capacity has lifted from 100 to 300, and the basic Greenhouse now has a slightly faster production rate and a higher storage capacity.

So anyway, for me this was one of those updates that was pretty large, but for the general players of the game, it should seem like a pretty small patch. Hopefully nothing major has been broken, but continue to let me know what bugs you find. I should note that on the Android and Windows clients, there is a new "Send Feedback" button on the My Colony sidebar that will allow you to send a message or bug report directly to my Inbox, and I will add this to the Desktop, Web, and iOS versions at some point too. A lot of times people leave bug reports in the app store comments, and those are easy for me to miss.

That's all for today;s update though, let me know what you find, stay tuned for more, and thanks for playing My Colony!

Great Idea love to see the aging factory flushed out great thinking. Might I suggest adding a birth rate, a death rate, a retirement rate, and a "becoming 18 rate" to the population tab to better help to make housing and jobs for citizens in the future.

bastecklein said:Server rollback would be possible, but not currently possible to rollback all of the resources and money that have gone out to the individual colonies, which is where most of the damage has been done.

I noticed my GDP gets a big jump when I buy cheap stuff. Maybe filter any colony with GDP growth in excess of100% in the last 12 hours?

For my agricultural idea I've put together some herbs and other plants that aid in the rpg/adventure aspect of the game. Some of these plants can create powerful elemental resistance potions or elemental catalysts needed to cast spells. Some are very picky in terms of the biome that they want to grow in, yet others can be grown anywhere.

Flaming Peppers:
grows wild in - deserts
grown in - hot biomes only
use - ice resistance potions, fire arrows, fire catalysts.
growing info - the plant can be harvested without breaking and regrows peppers over time. crops need to have one square of room all around to grow(prevents easy mass production).

Frost Melon:
grows wild in - tiaga, tundra
grown in - cold biomes only
use - fire resistance potions, ice arrows, ice catalysts
growing info - grows just like the flaming peppers and has the same spacial requirements.

Rubber tree:
grows wild in - jungle
grown in - hot and temperate biomes, but not cold biomes.
use - shock resistance potion, potential source of rubber, which could be a crafting material.
growing info - grows like any other tree, drops rubber bark and the normal drops when broken and should drop saplings so that becomes a renewable source of rubber bark.

Zing berry bush:
grows wild in - tiaga, forest, jungle
grown in - tiaga, forest, jungle only. It needs shade to grow
use - static arrows and shock catalysts.
growing info - can be harvested without breaking the plant and will regenerate over some time. They need to be planted adjecent to a tree in order to produce berries. growing next to rubber trees provides a bonus to growth and fruit growing speed.

chamomile:
grows wild in - grasslands
grown in - anywhere.
uses - health potions
growing info - grown on grass or farmland, grows faster on farmland. Spreads fledgling plants to adjacent squares to make it easy to mass produce.

sugar cane:
grows wild in: swamp, jungle
grown in: anywhere
uses: potions and food.
growing info - must be grown next to water.

Char lilly:
grows wild in - must be crafted with various fire related ingredients.
grown in - hot biomes only
use - provides nectar for inferno bees. Inferno bee hives in turn produce fire catalysts instead of honey.
growing info - char lillies are sterile, so they must be crafted in order to make more. they can be placed next to one another and must grow on farmland. The rate at which inferno hives produce fire catalysts is directly related to how many of these lillies are placed in range of the hive. This would make it easy to mass produce fire catalysts, which will be needed more and more as you progress through the game.

Frostbite Orchid:
grows wild in: must be crafted from frost/ice related items.
grown in: cold biomes only
use - provides nectar for blizzard bees. Blizzard bee hives produce ice catalysts from the nectar.
growing info - also sterile and have to be crafted, same hive mechanics, just for a different element.

Static Azalea:
grows wild in - must be crafted from shock/static related items
grows in - all biomes
use - provides nectar to tempest bees. Tempest bee hives produce shoch catalysts from the nectar
growing infor - same as char lillies and frostbite orchides, but for the shock element.

night shade:
grows in: at the lowest depths of caves.
grown in: caves only
use: this plant contains the essence of corruption, an element that causes poisoning and madness. Can be used to make corruption arrows that turn enemies against one another and is also used in black catalysts.
growing info, must be grown on farm land in caves. must have at least one tile of space on all sides.

Glow coral:
grows wild in - the depths of the ocean
grown in - underwater only.
uses - this plant contains the essence of blinding light, this light is an element called holiness and can be used to craft holy arrows which cause massive damage to undead/corrupt enemies and set them ablaze, and is used in white catalysts.
growing info: must be placed on sea floor with one tile of room all around.

aetherial kelp:
grows wild in - underground ether rivers and oceans.
gown in - underground ether sea floor
uses - all cure potions that restore full health and remove all negative status effects, used in ether breathing potions, and used to make ether catalysts for ultima spells
growing info - very rare plant. grown on ether sea floor, must have three tiles of space all around to make mass production difficult. Harvesting the plant doesn't destroy the plant and it'll regrow it's harvestables over time.

Castor Bean plant:
grows in: jungle
grown in: jungle
uses: highly potent ricin poison that can inbue weapons and projectiles with poison damage. Also, there could be a possible poison catalyst if poison is to be an element, but let's assume it's not. Poisons would also be needed to make antidotes to rid yourself from being poisoned. Could also be used to make poison vials that would imbue all arrows and mele weapons with poison for a short time.
growing info: this plant will replicate a phenomenal rates by spawning fledgling plants right next to it or up to 2 tiles away, so all you have to do is plant on dirt and you'll have a ton of these in no time, no water required. Harvesting destroys the plant, but yields a lot of castor beans. Mass production should be easy, but these plants will kill all plants and animals near them, and there is a risk of poisoning yourself as you harvest them unless a protection method is implemented, such as rubber gloves. This makes these plants a pain to control for farming, but it's worthwhile to farm them. These need to be mass-produceable so that you can make lots of antidotes, poison vials, and poison arrows to aid you in your adventures, and poison is a pretty easy to come by thing in most rpg games.

aqualemon:
grows in: all levels of the ocean
grown in: all levels of the ocean
uses: water breathing potion and can be consumed as food for hunger and water breathing for a small amount of time.

Catalysts:
fire - used as ammo for fire spells. Made from flaming peppers, wax, and charcoal.
ice - used as ammo for ice spells
shock - used as ammo for shock spells
black - used as ammo for dark/poison/necro spells and can be used as ammo for fire, ice, and lightning spells. When used that way, it adds poison damage and boosts the elemental status effects that the particular spell imbues on the enemy.
white - used as ammo for healing/light/holy spells and can be used as ammo for fire, ice, and lightning spells. When used that way, it adds holy damage to the spell and boosts it's overall damage.
ether: can be used for any kind of spell and is mainly used as ammo for ultima spells. Ether catalysts should be very difficult to obtain.

potions and consumable:

potion of fire resistance: reduces fire damage and the likeliness of being set on fire, which does damage over time.
potion of frst resistance: reduces ice damage and the likeliness of being slowed or frozen in place.
potion of lightning resistance: reduces shock damage and the likeliness of being stunned or knocked back.
tea: crafted from water, sugar, and chamomile. Basic health potion.
antidote: this common potion needs to be easy to make because the player could get poisoned quite often.
all cure: made from aetherial kelp and other highly rare ingredients, this potion brings you back to square one so you can keep up the fight without having to retreat.
potion of water breathing: allows the player to breath under water for a time, vital for venturing deep into the ocean to get things like glow coral.
Potion of dark vision: allows you to see invisible enemies and objects and allows you to see night and underground as if it were day. Not completely required as enemies that use invisibility should uncloak for a time to let the player strike them. Would be made from black catalysts and other rare ingredients.
cleansing pack: a semi-common consumable that would cure most common status ailments other than poison, corruption, and blindness. Its made from soap, cotton, and water. Soap is made from animal fat and charcoal. It would need to be easy to mass produce as the player will often find themselves under a negative status effect.
eye drops: made from salt and water, salt comes from salt deposits under the ocean(and possibly in deserts), cures blindness.

Bees:
wax: harvested from hives and apiaries. Can be used to make candles, fire arrows, and fire catalysts.
Honey: restores health when consumed, can be used in better tiers of potions and consumables.
smoker: pacifies bees for a short time, allowing you to destroy their hive or apiary or harvest wax and honey. made with iron, charcoal, and zing berries, breaks after 64 uses.
Honey collector: made with wood and iron, used to harvest honey and wax from hives and apiaries. The amount of time it takes for a hive or apiary to fill with honey is directly related to how many plants you place in the range of the hives/apiaries. Chamomile flowers have the best affect, but all other plants can be used. Hives and apiaries increase plant growth speed and fruit generation speed of all plants around them by 20%, and if the ranges of hives/apiaries overlap then this effect can stack up to 5 times.

wild honey bee hives: occur naturally all over the world. The hive will attack if the player or other mobs get's too close, regardless of whether they intend to do harm, but the smoker tool can pacify them for a time. the hive will drop wax and 1-2 queens when broken.
apiary: crafted from wood, wax, and 1 wild or domestic queen bee. Bees will attack the player even though they are cultivated, but the damage is much less and apiaries that have been smoked are pacified for much longer than normal. Apiary bees will not attack a player for standing near the apiary, unlike the hive. However, hostile mobs that enter the range of an apiary are automatically attacked, making them good defensive turrets. However, this consumes honey, and they can't attack if out of honey, so it's important to not harvest defensive apiaries, and to put harvesting apiaries in a spot where they won't encounter hostility. The player can manually insert honey or catalysts(depending on the type of apiary) into the apiary to refuel it for battle. It will even drop itself when broken, allowing easy relocation. However, the apiary has a substantially reduced range compared to the hive.

elemental bees:
elemental siphon: used to siphon elemental catalysts from elemental apiaries. Elemental apiaries will attack the player with the elemental damage of their type when attempting to destroy or harvest from the apiary. The same apiary rules apply here regarding attack parameters, range, defensive action against hostile mobs, and smoke effect duration.
Inferno apiary: made from an apiary, a number of fire catalysts, a char lilly, and lots of charcoal. Drops itself when broken, allowing easy transportation. Only operates in hot biomes, produces fire catalysts at a speed directly related to how many char lilies in it's range. The lilies will die after a long time of use, dropping a depleted char lily that can be recharged by cooking in a furnace or with one fire catalyst. The inferno hive will always produce more catalysts than you'll end up using recharging the lilies, but you can get even more catalysts out of it just by cooking the lilies.

Blizzard apiary: made from an apiary, a number of ice catalysts, a frostbite orchid, and lots of ce. All of the rules for the inferno apiary apply here, just for the ice element. frostbite orchids can be recharged using ice catalysts or by crafting them with ice.

tempest Apiary: same rules apply as blizzard apiary but with the lightning element. Made from an apiary, a number of shock catalysts, a static azalea, and lots of rubber. static azaleas can be recharged with lightning catalysts or by crafting them with zing berries.

well, that's all I have for now, it's a big list of ideas, but I think it would make for some interesting gameplay mechanics. Let me know what you think.

The exact GDP of my colony is $363,902,839,860,000,500. There are colonies with higher GDP (I've seen 10 to 100 times my GDP) and their colonial website works just fine.